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Quiz: What You Don't Know About Batteries

You know how often you need to charge your smartphone, but how much do you really know about the batteries we rely on for energy storage?

Quiz by Marianne Lavelle

Who coined the term "battery"?

André-Marie Ampère

Benjamin Franklin

Alessandro Volta

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

In the 1760s, Franklin borrowed the military term for weapons functioning together, a "battery," to describe an array of glass jars he wired together to gather, store, and discharge an electrical charge.

How did a frog play a role in the invention of the battery?

A frog's swim through water showed how electrons move.

An early battery was used to shock a frog.

A frog's jump suggested the way electrons move.

A dissected frog's twitch signaled current moving.

Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, credited as inventor of the first practical battery in the 1800s, showed the frog's wet muscle tissue conducted current between the two different types of metal instruments.

What is the most accurate statement on how warm temperature affects batteries?

It causes them to overheat.

It increases their service lifetime.

It makes them charge or discharge more rapidly.

It makes them charge or discharge sluggishly.

In general, high temperatures cause batteries to charge or discharge faster, improving performance. But a battery’s total time in service can decrease if it is left too long in conditions that are too warm.

Which one is NOT an essential part of a battery?

Cathode

Anode

Acid

Electrolyte

Every battery has an anode, which loses electrons, and a cathode, which gains electrons, with an electrolyte—a salt bridge or conductive material—between the sides. Batteries may have an acidic or alkaline electrolyte.

One of the primary electric car challenges is said to be the tradeoff between power density and energy density in the battery. That's a choice between which two characteristics?

Cost and performance

Weight and safety

Battery lifetime and recharging speed

Acceleration and range

The power-energy density tradeoff refers to the challenge of finding a battery that offers sufficient acceleration power while storing enough energy for driving long distances between charges.

The largest consumer electronics recall ever was in 2006, involving 4.1 million Sony batteries in Dell laptops that were at risk of catching fire. What was the cause?

Metal particle contamination

Consumers leaving computers turned on

The batteries were past their useful life

Consumers overcharged the batteries

Lithium-ion cells are susceptible to thermal runaway caused by internal short circuits or collisions from the outside. The trigger for the Sony batteries was metal contamination introduced in the manufacturing process.

Sometimes systems in nature can act as batteries, storing surplus energy to be released when needed. Which of these physical systems is currently the most widespread technology in the world for large-scale electricity storage?

Which of these is a relatively abundant, stable material that is a key ingredient in Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf electric vehicle batteries? Its presence may inhibit thermal runaway, but a key drawback is limited driving range.

To allow greater use of intermittent energy, such as wind and solar power

To reduce the need to build more power plants

All of the above

More energy storage on the electric grid would make it more reliable and allow more renewable energy to be added to the grid, and potentially could curb the need for new power plants. Cost has been the biggest obstacle.

What energy storage device charges faster and lasts longer than a battery?

Leyden jar

Supercapacitor

Superconductor

Semiconductor

Supercapacitors store energy as electrical charge (instead of storing it in chemical reactants, as batteries do.) They don't suffer the physical toll in charging and discharging that wears down batteries.

As of 2013, where is the world's largest battery?

China

Texas

Alaska

Germany

China announced in 2011 that it had constructed the world's largest battery energy storage station, at 36 megawatt-hours, to integrate wind and solar onto its grid. Alaska and Texas also have large grid battery installations.

Historians say the modern era of energy began on October 17, 1973, when Arab exporters unleashed the "oil weapon" with an embargo against the United States and its allies. How much do you know about the global oil shocks of the past 40 years and how they changed the world?

Every few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a new summary of the scientific consensus on climate change. How much do you know about the forces altering the Earth's temperature, according to the IPCC's September 2013 report?